Relive CERN’s highlights as the lab turns 60

By Matin Durrani

CERN has been celebrating its 60th anniversary all this month, but it was in fact six decades ago today – on Wednesday 29 September 1954 – that the lab’s convention was ratified by its first 12 member states: Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK and Yugoslavia.

Physics World has played its own small part in marking the anniversary, including a careers feature on what skills you need as CERN director-general, a day-in-the-life blog written by current CERN boss Rolf-Dieter Heuer, and an appearance at the lab’s TEDx event last week by our columnist Robert P Crease.

This blog entry rounds off our coverage of CERN at 60 with a few links to classic material from our archives.

First off, there’s Tommaso Dorigo’s superb 2011 feature about what motivates CERN researchers to stay up all night taking data. If you want to relive the long back-story of the search for the Higgs boson, don’t miss Michael Riordan’s article that looks back at how the particle was predicted and the early experimental searches for it. And why not relive the day on 4 July 2012 when physicsworld.com editor Hamish Johnston reported live from CERN about the discovery of the Higgs finally being announced, which was followed by frenzied discussion the day after about what the finding all meant.

It’s not all been plain sailing for CERN in recent times, of course. After the whizz-bang first day in September 2008 when the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was switched on, it soon ran in trouble after a severe magnet failure. I’m sure CERN won’t want to be reminded either of the time a piece of baguette got stuck in the LHC.

Going back further, don’t miss either Matthew Chalmers’ 2008 profile of Heuer, in which the then incoming CERN boss revealed his nightmare scenario would be to announce a Higgs signal that later turned out to be a false alarm – a scenario that he happily looks to have avoided. Chalmers also captured the mood at CERN brilliantly in this 2006 feature about life at CERN just as the LHC was about to fire up. That year also saw Andy Parker from the University of Cambridge examine the scientific ambitions of the LHC in the cracking article “Expedition to inner space”.

We shouldn’t forget either how CERN was deeply split in 2000 when lab bosses decided to switch off the forerunner of the LHC – the Large Electron-Positron (LEP) collider – just as it seemed on the verge of finding something interesting. It sparked serious protests from researchers back then, though it would be interesting to know how they feel about that decision today.

If you can’t be bothered with all that stuff, you might just want to sit back and view my interview with Heuer from 2009 (above), while there’s also my colleague James Dacey’s video report from CERN in early 2011 (below).

Here’s to another 60 years!